feneur

Not sure it would be all that much easier to search for a button. (Especially since the in-game area would have to be reduced in favor of the GUI if we add too many buttons ) After all, the first resource dropoff point should be close to where you are in the first place, and you'd need to move the mouse to the next resource anyway. The only good thing about a button imho would be that you would be able to memorize where it is and thus find it quicker because of that. You'd still need to move the mouse away though, so I doubt that makes it worth it.

I haven't actually tested, but it should be possible to just shift-right-click on the dropoff point and then on the next resource to queue it automatically. (Iirc there are still some issues with the group code and queuing, at least for some orders, so perhaps it only works for single units.)

Some minor things: The game is developed in C++, not C. For the operating systems, do we really still support Windows 2000? I thought we added something/some dependency a year or two ago that made at least Windows XP required. I could be wrong on that one though, so don't change anything just on my suspicion. How to start 0 A.D. As long as you have installed an Alpha (and unless it doesn't differ between OS versions) the way to start 0 A.D. would be: Start-->All programs (or something similar, don't have an English version of Windows installed, so the wording might be different)-->0 A.D. alpha-->0 A.D. Feedback section: It would be helpful if you mentioned that if people want to give more in-depth feedback, or get help solving any possible issues, it would be better to go to the forums. The feedback messages aren't checked as often, and most importantly there's no way for us to get back to the users in question to offer more help or ask for clarifications etc. 2.3.1 Single Player. Under "Map Filter" you say the engine is called Pyrogenisis, the correct spelling is Pyrogenesis Also in that section you can feel free to mention the additional options you can set for random map games. 4.0 Units. There is a started sentence: "You can read more about the", which seems to need some continuation 4.1.2 Citizen soldiers. "It is important to notice that advanced building can only be built by citizen soldiers." advanced building-->advanced buildings A very minor thing, but it's nice to be consistent: it's up to you whether you want to capitalize Citizen Soldiers etc, but I'd say do it the same way all the time. One way would be to capitalize it the first time it's included and then not (apart from the first word when it's at the start of a sentence of course 8-) ). 4.1.5 Navy. Probably easier to explain by just saying it's the ships "Wood can only be gathered from trees, if you cant see many trees around you. Send a scout or other fast unit to go looking for some in the shroud of darkness (also known as the Fog-of-War)." Two things, first a very small thing: I would write the part from "from trees" to "Send a scout" to: "from trees. If you can't see many trees around you send a scout" etc. Second, the Shroud of Darkness and Fog of War are two different things. The Shroud of Darkness is the dark area that covers areas that you haven't explored yet, the Fog of War is the grey fog covering the areas of the map which are already explored, but which is not in line of sight of any of your units/buildings. When we're talking about resources, don't forget to add some info about bartering which will be included in Alpha 8 I know you haven't yet updated it for Alpha 8, but I'm just mentioning it here so you don't forget it 6.1 Training units. It might be a good idea to mention that you can train units in batches of five/any number divisible by five by pressing the Shift key one or more times when starting the training. It costs the same as training them one by one, but it is faster to train five at a time than one by one five times. It of course still takes longer to train five units than one of course though, so it's not necessarily the best in the beginning of the game. 6.2 Constructing buildings "Female soldiers"--> Female Citizens (they are after all working units rather than fighting units ) 7.1 Rushing. "At the start of a game, during first few minutes"--> "At the start of a game, during the first few minutes". 7.2 Booming. "Actions: At the beginning, focus on a better economy, and make enough female citizens to have a total of 15 female-citizens in the beginning". First a very minor thing, for consistency I suggest removing the hyphen between female and citizens. Second, it's generally not a good idea to just create a lot of female citizens in the beginning as they are not as good at gathering other things than food from berries and farms. (I think they are slower at building as well.) Their low cost of course still make them important in the beginning, I just think it's important not to only create female citizens (especially since that makes you more vulnerable ). Turtling and Ambush, the final section of each: "But don't be tempted to send troops from your backup base to the base your losing." "base your losing"-->"base you're losing" Overall some really nice work, hope you'll keep it up

Sorry I would prefer to have them reviewed first, it was so long ago that these lists were compiled, but I'm not sure we have someone on the team with enough knowledge of ancient Greek to do that. Perhaps ask the forumers to help? There seems to be a couple with at least some knowledge of ancient Greek.

Not sure whether this is something qbot should do as much as UnitAI should do. At least the general part, imho ranged units should always try and get farther away from melee units than just to the minimum range limit. As it is now they move just enough to be able to shoot if the attacker stays in the same spot, but that doesn't work since the attacker is getting closer. I'd say ranged units should always try and get to say 75% of the distance between minimum range and maximum range when being attacked by a melee unit. The "order a group attack" part is something I agree the AIs should do though

As per Philip's suggestion it's probably a good idea to try and figure out a bit more what exactly it is we want with the formations before we've spent several months just listing our ideas on formations and what they might be like. I'm getting sleepy so I'm just going to copy Philip's questions and try and give my opinion on them, please feel free to fill in the blanks and add any additional aspects. The main thing is the one that's been frequently mentioned before: the moshpit fighting. So, regardless of exactly how we end up doing formations I believe this is one of the main things we shold avoid. I don't remember the formations giving much of a benefit/incentive to use anything other than the basic one, so that's another issue we should keep in mind. Imho formations definitely should add an extra layer of tactics to combat. In the Age games it's generally more about producing troops and getting them to the battle field, and doing it more quickly than your enemy, than actually using your units in a good and effective way. I would like both More fun micromanagement and less boring. Seriously though, this is partly why I suggested doing something like having the battalion/formation divided into sections/sides. Now I never learned too much about the micromanagement in the Age games as I mostly played against the default AIs, but to me it's a bit tedious gaining a slight benefit from things like having all/many archers aiming at the same enemy unit. To some extent my answer is similar to the second question: I think having formations that actually block enemy movement effectively is one of the things that would help making them useful/fun. That way they would actually be useful compared to just units standing there in some random order. On the other hand I think they should not block too much, because that would rule out flanking/attacking from the rear etc which would help make eg the horse units useful in a way they aren't now. In fact, one of the major reasons why I think we should have useful formations in general, regardless of exactly how we implement them/what they do, is to give some benefit/use to melee units. Currently ranged units are way more useful. I guess the alternative would be to make ranged units less useful (i.e. less accurate, doing less damage etc), but having units being less useful sounds like less fun. At least above a certain level of balancing. In general I think large formations doesn't add much more than coolness/looks, but they do offer a value in the sense that they would for example block off larger areas. But that probably just means relatively large and not insanely large =)

The original plan was to release it earlier than that, but it was decided that we should try and solve some of the biggest performance issues before making the release. So we are currently unable to say when we will be able to release Alpha 8. Hopefully at least in time for Christmas, but we cannot say for sure yet.

It was added =) I think Ben did it last time. If you know the Unicode code for that specific letter the easiest way to make sure it's done is to create a ticket called something like "Add Unicode character ###" to Trac (This was the last time I believe: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/960 So it seems it was Philip who fixed it, but Ben who reported it.)

Yeah, and I remember when playing AoK that even if I had deforested the entire map etc, I rarely used even close to all those resources (as you may guess I enjoy playing defensively And basically wait until the AI was already defeated before attacking =) ). It might be fun for some people/in some cases if there is a gameplay mode with renewable resources, so I'm not against it completely, but I don't think it should be the default.

Just thought of another thing, it would be great if qbot would be able to barter, that way it could survive even if an enemy at that point is surrounding it and it has used used up all nearby wood, but there is plenty of stone and metal (and more long-term food, but if it hasn't resolved this particular issue by that time it probably has no chance). Not sure how much it would take to get it to do that though, and in general I'd say it's better to focus on expansion so it never finds itself in that situation. Just something to keep in mind. Once trade is in qbot should definitely use that though, I'd say that should be higher priority. Both because that actually produces resources (compared to barter which just converts them to get you out of a tricky situation etc) and because it would be great for interacting with other players in a non-combat way (and even if you're not allied with qbot trade routes would be either a nice target or at the very least they'd make the map more alive ).

Some of those should be fixed already, and we're hoping to have most fixed for Alpha 8 (a big reason why it might still be a while before it's out, we want to try our best to improve the performance, especially in cases like this).

Well, as you say our content is licensed under CC-BY-SA, so we can't, and won't restrict you from putting it up on your site. I'm having trouble seeing what we would gain from putting in any effort in getting the content onto the site ourselves though. Most of our content is created with the specific purpose of being in the game, and while other people could find some use/inspiration in our content I think it is to a lesser degree that we could benefit from other people's content. To some extent one of the reasons we're creating this game is for the sheer joy of creating, so using pre-existing models doesn't sound anywhere near as rewarding. Either way it is probably going to take some work to get the models to work properly for your site. We do not use the texture information in the Collada files themselves, but rather use XML files to tie models and textures together. Now, I'm not one of the artists, so I don't know all the aspects of what that means, but if nothing else the person uploading the files would have to make sure both the model and the texture is available in the same folder + update the path (and possibly other information) in the Collada file to link to the texture.

(But preferably with some more space between them =) Right now they squish together/overlap a bit too much But yeah, I think they should be completely outside any formations in that sense. Perhaps if you select them together they'd move along behind the formation, either spread out behind it or in a line behind it depending on what space there is.)

I'm also mostly a fan of the way AoE does things =) But with this I'm definitely starting to lean more towards doing things like this: units are created as individual units (and in terms of promotion etc always are), when doing economic tasks they stay as individual units, even if you've given them a group order (perhaps even give them some "spread out" unitAI to avoid all gathering from the same tree etc, and more importantly to avoid having to individually order them to gather from individual trees, to avoid issues with units gathering in places where you really don't want them they should probably just spread out within LOS of the spot you initially ordered them to gather from). When you want to move larger groups they get put into a column "formation", which is as thin as required depending on the obstacles and "snakes" around obstacles on the way. If they are attacked during the way they break out as individual units and respond (only if they are within LOS of the attack, if some units in the column aren't they just keep on walking, if they later come within LOS of the enemy - depending on stance and whether or not you're using attack move - they also respond to the attack). True formations should only be used on the battle field (i.e. big open spaces), and be a "battalion". Their movement would be restricted (slow, takes time to turn around), but they would be greatly bonused in other ways. I'm thinking they should still keep individual experience (they might have been part of another formation earlier etc), but should probably lose hitpoints evenly. Or perhaps the formation could be split in a couple of areas for damage purposes? That way the direction you attack the formation would matter, but it wouldn't matter exactly which unit was hit. In fact you'd only be able to attack the formation as a whole/per section rather than individually. If you want to get units back to economic purposes you'd turn off formations and perhaps also if you want to pursue fleeing enemy units (as most if not all formations should be slower than individual units moving around). It would be really nice if it is possible to have the units automatically go back and forth between "proper" formation and a column for movement. That way it would be more likely for players to actually use them, while allow the game to benefit from the good things of using a column for movement. Not sure whether that's reasonably easy to do though

Something like that is the plan yeah We don't necessarily make any difference between male and female animals, but the idea is that you will be able to corral domestic animals (chicken, goats, etc) and get a slow trickle of food. That would symbolize milk, but also eggs and killing off a few every year etc.

Ah, true. Was thinking about the Romans, but thought "Oh, but they have more or less two buildings already" =) But now that you said the above I'm reminded that (apart from generally most likely being used together) none are meant to be built "at home", so they'd not have something unique in their base. A Siege Workshop would be great

I also think something like what we have now is good. We need to remember not to make the game too difficult to understand for new players. If you think about it there are quite some different buildings, all civs has at least one special building, and the only civ that just has one so far is the Celts, and for them you get two different fortresses depending on which sub-faction you choose (I know it's not a new building in terms of function, but at least it adds some variation). I don't think we should add any more buildings at the moment at least. If we find in Beta that new players easily grasps the current buildings and that new buildings would enhance the gameplay, that's another thing.

Finally got around to adding the useful of the ones you mention, I've left out the G key as that seems less than useful in most cases. I think it's generally best to keep this document as short and basic as possible, at least until we have a proper manual system with several pages, and perhaps search etc, for now too much information and people will be unable to find the important stuff in all the text. For more info there's always the Wiki manual.

Yeah, I was reminded yesterday about that =) It's up to them what they do with the engine, but they have to obey the rules

The technology system isn't yet implemented, so at the moment it's not possible. I'm afraid you'll have to wait a while yet.

No, there's no communication between us and them. And no, they don't contribute to the engine in any way.

Oh Amish posted about it a while ago I think.

It's actually an old feature =) It's been planned for as long as I know to have the cavalry able to capture female citizens. (Having them carrying them to the home base would take too much work to implement I would guess, so the plan is to have them convert enemy female citizens which are within an area around your cavalry units, and don't have any enemy non-female units nearby.)

Yes, we are aware of it.

I played a bit on Oasis V against Jubot today, and every say ten seconds or so there was a slow-down. It seemed like it was caused by the AI being confused by there being two CCs (or at least because it tried to put units from both places in formations or something, or perhaps just that the central, most direct route between the two initial player one CCs is fairly narrow, with a lot of trees). That's probably a bit hard to work around (alternatively depend on other non-AI improvements). Another thing I noticed should hopefully be easier to do something about: the AI tried to build CCs right on the edge of my territories, where it was easy for me to destroy them (at least once I noticed what it was doing =) ). Perhaps you could put in a limit for how close to the enemy CCs/fortresses the new CCs should be built. At least the first ones shouldn't generally be too close as they are too vulnerable.